In this Film Ireland podcast, Gemma Creagh talks to Keith Walsh about When All is Ruin Once Again, a film about rural life in the midst of great local, national and global change.
When All is Ruin Once Again was filmed over a 7 year period amongst the communities of Gort in South Galway and Crusheen in Co. Clare where the filmmakers keith Walsh and Jill Beardsworth live. A new motorway ploughs forth through the landscape, a glaring symbol of our modern age.
The film weaves an expansive tapestry of reflections from bog-lands, fire-sides, race tracks and hurling pitches;all while the country is hit by the worst economic crisis it has ever faced and the realisation that we are living unsustainably slowly dawns.
W.B Yeats, who lived and wrote in the area where the film is set, provides the title’s prophetic words and prompts us to consider the value of memory and the impermanence of our existence. All is in flux. The mis-use of our natural resources percolates beneath the surface and rises up in the form of rising flood-waters. The proliferation of a landscape shaped by man suggests that it won’t betime that ends our civilisation, as Yeats suggests, but the actions of humans.
By the filmmakers who made the critically acclaimed Apples of the Golan and featuring the haunting music of Caoimhín Ó Ragalliagh, this film exists somewhere between classic ethnography, abstract poetry and a clarion call for the age we live in.
When All is Ruin Once Again is available on demand.
access>CINEMA at Home screenings of When All Is Ruin Once Again
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